Ultimate choice for an external evaluation of network design

16.8.2011

Ultimate choice for an external evaluation of network design

As a long-time follower of Ivan’s copious and excellent content, he was my ultimate choice for an external evaluation of our network design. I approached Ivan with little hope that we could acquire his services in the time frame available to us, but I was pleasantly surprised that he was available, and Martin [Camp] from our local NIL office worked wonders to arrange things to our requirements.

Ivan absorbed our design and business requirements [immediately]. Before we could even present the several designs we had in mind for a particular issue, he outlined an elegant hybrid of our two preferred options, keeping all of the pros and none of the cons. With an immediate appreciation of the caliber of the resource we had available to us, our team threw every issue we had wrestled with into the discussion, and thankfully the majority we resolved as efficiently as possible. Our final issue was a particularly thorny one, which we had been revising and refining for several weeks. [As] we described the requirements, but not our final design, Ivan peppered us with insightful questions as to the specifics of the business requirements and equipment limitations; in the space of a couple of hours, [he] had come to practically the exact design that our several weeks of effort had produced.

[Our] team was privileged to have worked so closely with the man who literally ‘wrote the book’ on one of the most widely used protocols in our industry today. It was a pleasure to work with an expert with such a deep understanding of not only the business strategy and technology, but the practicalities of real-world implementations and limitations.

As I hope this rather lengthy recommendation shows, I cannot recommend Ivan and his excellent company NIL highly enough.

Ian Castleman, Network Architect, MWEB

Project Information

As the company was making changes in their network, they asked NIL’s Ivan Pepelnjak to work with them as an external consultant. The collaboration is described by MWEB’s Network Architect, Ian Castleman.

About the client

MWEB is the second-largest Internet Service Provider in South Africa, currently serving more than 320,000 users.

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